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Paths of Dissent

Review by Roger Bishop

Since 1973, when President Richard Nixon and Congress created the all-volunteer force as an alternative to conscripted military service, there has been a division between the American public and the military. Less than one-half of 1% of our population currently serves on active duty. And as the public has watched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue on for years after 9/11, they have become more uncertain than ever about U.S. missions.

But active duty and retired military personnel have become more uncertain too. In an enlightening new book, Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, a diverse group of veterans who volunteered and served in those wars tell us what they saw, did and learned. In these original essays, selected by co-editors Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen for their candor and eloquence, the contributors share their reasons for deciding to serve, why they became disillusioned and why they now feel the need to speak out about “military policies that they deem ill advised, illegal, or morally unconscionable.”

Erik Edstrom, a West Point graduate, was an infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan, where he “saw the systematic dehumanization and devaluation of Afghan lives on a regular basis. . . . It’s one of America’s deepest ironies: in efforts to ‘prevent terrorism’ in our country, we commit far larger acts of terrorism elsewhere,” he writes. Joy Damiani was an enlisted public affairs specialist who served two tours in Iraq. “According to the Army’s official narrative,” she writes, “the war was always in the process of being won. There were never any mistakes, never any defeats, and certainly never any failures.” Buddhika Jayamaha was an airborne infantryman in Iraq. He and many others “felt that the extreme hubris of American politicians and the commentariat was responsible for the mess in Iraq.”

Bacevich, who served for 23 years in the Army, including in Vietnam, writes that “genuine military dissent is patriotic.” Any citizen who wants to better understand our country’s current military entrapments will want to read this book.

In 17 original essays, U.S. veterans share their reasons for deciding to serve, why they became disillusioned with the military and why they now feel the need to speak out against its misguided policies.
NonfictionHistoryCultural HistoryArt

Picasso’s War

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

By the mid-20th century, Pablo Picasso’s paintings and sculptures were turning heads in France and Germany, ushering in cubism, a new artistic style that challenged older styles. At this same moment, American art was dominated by a devotion to realism and the old masters, and therefore resistant to and repulsed by the “modern art” of Picasso. In 1939, that all changed when the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York City held an exhibit titled “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art,” featuring pieces that two Americans, who never met, worked tirelessly to make available to the public. Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War tells the scintillating tale of how John Quinn, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and others brought Picasso’s work to America and changed the face of American art.

Irish American lawyer Quinn championed modernist novels and poetry and avant-garde art, introducing Americans to William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot, as well as to Marcel Duchamp’s painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.” A great collector, Quinn had a “growing aversion to what he called ‘dead art,’” Eakin writes, and wanted to promote painters and writers who could “express the values and forces of his own time.” Although he personally never understood cubism, he believed that “American art needs the shock that the work of some of these men will give.” After he met Picasso, the artist started reserving his best work for Quinn, who built a modest collection. Quinn dreamed of opening a museum devoted explicitly to modern art, since the Metropolitan Museum of Art excluded such art as “degenerate.” He never saw his wish come true, however. He died of cancer in 1924.

In 1926, Barr took up Quinn’s vision for such a museum, aided by wealthy patrons who shared Quinn’s hope. Three years later, Barr opened the Museum of Modern Art using pieces from Quinn’s collection, striving to build a collection of premier work by the most important modern artists. He worked incessantly to open a show devoted to Picasso, but he was hampered at several turns by challenges from Parisian art dealers and even by Picasso himself. By the late 1930s, though, as Adolf Hitler’s campaign against so-called degenerate art ramped up and museums and galleries in Paris began removing and hiding certain paintings, Picasso and his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, tried to get as many of the artist’s paintings as possible to America. Such forces enabled Barr to put on his 1939 Picasso exhibit and to secure a place in the American cultural world not only for Picasso but also for the Museum of Modern Art, which flourished following the Picasso exhibit.

Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about this illuminating chapter in cultural history.

Hugh Eakin’s rapturous storytelling makes Picasso’s War a spellbinding, page-turning read about the fight to bring Picasso’s art to America.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryBlack History

Under the Skin

Review by Alden Mudge

Linda Villarosa grew up in a high-achieving Black family in a mostly white suburb of Denver. When she began writing about Black women’s health for Essence in the mid-1980s, her articles were all about self-help and self-improvement, based on the assumption that poverty and poor education were the reasons for detrimental health conditions among Black people.

But then she discovered that well-educated, upper-middle-class Black women were also having underweight babies and higher rates of maternal death than white women. She found herself wondering, “Why is the current Black-white disparity in both maternal and infant mortality widest at the upper levels of education? And what was it about our health-care system that exacerbated this problem?”

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation answers these questions and many more. In one of the most interesting chapters, Villarosa writes about “weathering,” a concept developed by Dr. Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Weathering is the idea that “high-effort coping from fighting against racism leads to chronic stress that can trigger premature aging and poor health outcomes.” It draws the throughline from systemic failure to a harmful bodily response.

Under the Skin audiobook image
Read our starred review of the audiobook for ‘Under the Skin.’

Villarosa, who now writes for The New York Times Magazine, explores many more aspects of American prejudice and health in this book. In a chapter recounting a visit to Appalachia to write about the addiction crisis among poor white people, she suggests that many of these people suffer from the debilitating effects of class discrimination, with similarly negative health repercussions. She examines myths about Black genetics—that Black people are less sensitive to pain than whites, for example—that persist within the medical community to the detriment of Black Americans. She looks at how racism in housing forces many Black families into environmentally hostile neighborhoods. And, based on her reporting, she offers several ideas for improving community health that she believes will change American health care for the better.

Under the Skin is wonderfully written. It’s not an inaccessible academic work or a polemic. Rather, its points are made amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences. The book also serves as a stake in the ground for Villarosa as she powerfully discloses what years of reporting have led her to understand: “The something that is making Black Americans sicker is not race per se, or the lack of money, education, information, and access to health services that can be tied to being Black in America. It is also not genes or something inherently wrong or inferior about the Black body. The something is racism.”

Linda Villarosa’s wonderfully written book makes stunning points about the health risks of racism amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Divorce Colony

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When rich women seeking a “migratory divorce” headed west by train to states with more lenient divorce laws in the 1890s—maids, lawyers and multiple wardrobe trunks in tow—they hardly looked like revolutionaries. Yet they started something. Historian April White’s exhaustive account, The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier, captures a game-changing cultural moment during the tumultuous years of the Gilded Age.

In the late 19th century, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, required only a 90-day residency before a woman could file for divorce, making it a magnet for those in more of a hurry to get divorced than other states would allow. In New York, only proof of adultery and (still true today) a year’s residency did the trick; South Carolina allowed nothing to break the sacred marital bond. White’s colorfully detailed work follows four women, their families and their paths out of unsatisfying marriages through the courts of law and public opinion to their fates as divorcées—or wives once more.

Baroness Maggie De Stuers traveled with her private secretary, soon to be her next spouse. Mary Nevins Blaine blamed her mother-in-law, not her inept husband, for her marital woes. Blanche Molineux never wanted to marry in the first place. Flora Bigelow Dodge “wanted something entirely without precedent: ‘a legal and dignified Dakota divorce.'” Reporters followed these women, spying on their luxurious suites in the city’s iconic Cataract House, seeking gossip and scandal. Businesses profited from their deep pockets. Clergy denounced them as threats to all that God had joined together. Judges became suspicious. Lawmakers, from local governments to the White House, wrestled with family values and federal oversight—a struggle that continues today, as different states still choose different rules for divorce and as the challenge of defining and upholding women’s rights goes on.

In White’s hands, this slice of history is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

In April White’s hands, this slice of Gilded Age history about women who headed west to states with more lenient divorce laws is entertaining and enlightening.
NonfictionMemoirLatin American HistoryHistory

The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Memory is already a slippery thing. And when it’s tangled in family lore and embedded in a country’s violent history, it can prove even more elusive. When Ingrid Rojas Contreras was in her 20s, living far away from her native Colombia, she suffered a head injury and became a terrified amnesiac. Desperate to retrieve her memory and understand the dreams and ghosts that plagued her, she set out for her family’s hometown of Ocaña, Colombia, to find the facts of her family’s history. (Mami heckled her daughter’s use of the word facts: “Can you believe the girl is going to Ocaña to look for facts? To Ocaña! In a family like ours? With the quality of our stories?”)

In Rojas Contreras’ enthralling memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, she finds the historical and genealogical facts she’s looking for, but the stories her family reveals are far more powerful. In fact, they are magical, especially those involving Mami and her father, Nono, who could move clouds “for farmers who needed rain.”

In a dream Rojas Contreras had—the same dream her Mami and two aunts also had—her dead grandfather, Nono, made it clear to her that he wanted his remains disinterred, and so the author’s journey from Chicago to Colombia began. Nono was known as a curandero, or homeopath. He was sought after as a healer and feared as a mystic, endowed with “secrets” such as communing with the dead and foreseeing the future. When Mami fell—or was pushed—down a well as a child, he saved her life, and she seemed to inherit his powers. Rojas Contreras’ head injury also left her with “secrets,” such as the ability to appear in two places at the same time. In her large Colombian family, none of these skills seemed strange, though some members saw them as blessings and others feared them as a curse.

Rojas Contreras’ acclaimed first novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, introduced the fraught landscape of Colombia in the late 20th century, when assassins and kidnappers thrived while parents struggled to keep their children safe. Now, in her deftly woven memoir, she makes this history more immediate and personal, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras makes the recent history of Colombia immediate, personal and magical, with prose that in itself is enchantingly poetic.
NonfictionPoliticsHistoryAmerican History

One Person, One Vote

Review by Roger Bishop

“The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote,” wrote Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas in 1963. It seems simple enough. However, as we learn in fascinating and depressing detail from Nick Seabrook’s wide-ranging history, One Person, One Vote, when politicians intentionally draw boundaries for partisan advantage, politicians pick their voters rather than voters picking politicians.

The practice known today as gerrymandering began long before the term first appeared in 1812, when Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard G) of Massachusetts signed a bill that seriously distorted voting districts for political purposes. He was not directly involved in preparing the legislation and found it distasteful, but his name nonetheless became attached to it. Gerry later served as vice president under James Madison. Earlier in Madison’s career, Patrick Henry had used the tactic in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Madison from being elected to the House of Representatives. If Madison had lost the election, we might not have his Bill of Rights.

Prior to the 1970s, when the constitutional mandate to redistrict every 10 years went into effect, gerrymandering was the exception rather than the norm. Politicians only used this tactic when it was necessary or expedient, which was rare—especially since the detailed election data and computer technology that has become so crucial to modern election strategy was not yet available.

Those who benefit from gerrymandering are determined not to lose their advantage. Even the Supreme Court has failed to address the harms of the practice. On three separate occasions, challenges to the most pervasive partisan gerrymanders of the 21st century have come before the Supreme Court, but reformers came away disappointed. Instead, change has almost always come from concerned citizens who convinced elected officials to take on the issue.

Seabrook’s important book should be of interest to every citizen who wants to better understand what goes on behind the scenes as political parties seek power.

Nick Seabrook’s One Person, One Vote should be read by every citizen who wants to understand what goes on behind the scenes as political parties seek power.
NonfictionReligion & SpiritualityHistoryAmerican History

In the Houses of Their Dead

Review by Alice Cary

Ten-year-old Tad Lincoln loved the theater, especially one animated performer he watched at a Washington, D.C., playhouse in 1863. “I’d like to meet that actor,” he said. “He makes you thrill.” Tad quickly got his wish: After the performance, the stage manager escorted him and his friend into the actor’s dressing room, where John Wilkes Booth greeted them warmly. “The future murderer of Tad’s father gave a rose to each child from a bouquet presented him over the footlights,” writes historian Terry Alford in his endlessly fascinating book In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits.

Alford knows his subject inside and out, having written Fortune’s Fool, a landmark biography of Booth that Karen Joy Fowler has praised as a major resource for her novel, Booth. In the Houses of Their Dead explores both the Lincolns’ and the Booths’ enthrallment with spiritualism, the belief that living people can communicate with deceased people’s spirits. Members of both families were shattered time after time by a litany of heartbreaking, often torturous illnesses and deaths, which inspired a desire to communicate with their dead loved ones. The two families even sometimes turned to the same mediums, which is just one of many historical threads that tie these two tragedy-bound families together. And yes, there were numerous White House seances, one of which was said to have levitated Abraham Lincoln in the Red Room as he sat atop a grand piano!

Alford seamlessly tells the two families’ stories, starting with the major players’ childhoods and continuing until their deaths—and after. He’s a fair-minded narrator of these complicated historical figures, never casting judgment but rather letting the historical record speak for itself through his riveting, elegant prose. He presents, for instance, Lincoln as a young man playing a prank on a friend by persuading two other friends to dress as ghosts as they walked home one dark night. “Never have I seen another who provoked so much mirth and who entered into rollicking fun with such glee. He could make a cat laugh,” wrote one admirer. That characterization certainly contrasts with the more common portrayal of a brooding, whip-smart but sometimes awkward Lincoln.

Alford sets the historical stage well, allowing readers to understand the emotional underpinnings of Lincoln’s assassination, which he memorably describes. Particularly fascinating are the details of its aftermath—how, for instance, Mary Todd Lincoln was left with restricted funds, living in boarding houses and rented rooms as she tried to deal with the deaths of her husband and, ultimately, three of her beloved sons. In 1872, a noted “spirit photographer” produced an image of her that supposedly showed Lincoln standing behind her, hands on her shoulders, with one of their lost sons nearby.

The history of Abraham Lincoln and his enthrallment with spiritualism has never been more surprising than in Terry Alford’s In the Houses of Their Dead.
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

n war, Napoleon wrote, “three-quarters turns on personal character and . . . the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.” In notable biographies of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, and John C. Breckinridge, its last secretary of war, and in dozens of other books on the Civil War, historian William C. Davis has underscored the prominence of “personal character” in shaping the Confederacy’s rise and fall.

In his engaging and well written An Honorable Defeat, Davis focuses closely on the last four months (January-April 1865) of the Confederacy’s existence. He frames the South’s defeat around the differing visions and personalities of Jefferson Davis and Breckinridge. William C. Davis knows the history of the Confederacy as well as any historian today, and his penetrating analysis of Jefferson Davis and Breckinridge provides a fresh look at their contrasting emotions, differing world views and divergent conceptions of southern honor and defeat.

Jefferson Davis was a cold, combative, distant autocrat. He meddled constantly in his generals’ affairs, gave his cabinet secretaries little authority and frittered away the Confederacy’s one economic ace in the hole “King Cotton.” Yet for all his shortcomings as president, Jefferson Davis was totally dedicated perhaps too dedicated to the southern cause. “If only Davis’ personality and temperament had been more winning,” writes William C. Davis, “and his grasp of human nature more keen . . . those who became his enemies might have forgiven him a multitude of lesser shortcomings.” In contrast to Davis, Breckinridge was flexible, balanced and popular, and the Kentuckian rose rapidly through the hierarchy of the Confederate Army to the rank of major general. “Charming and engaging, diplomatic, the least egotistical or confrontational of men,” William C. Davis explains, Breckinridge “never sought conflict, and yet even [Jefferson] Davis, so often undiscerning, saw well enough that this was a man he could not dominate.” The conflict of wills erupted in March 1865, as Union troops encircled Richmond, and the Confederacy disintegrated from within. President Davis, unwilling to accept anything short of independence and refusing to surrender, admonished white southerners to fight a guerilla war and to rally around remaining Confederate troops in Texas. Secretary of War Breckinridge disagreed, favoring an honorable, negotiated peace. “This has been a magnificent epic,” Breckinridge lectured a delegation of Confederate senators, urging them “in God’s name let it not terminate in a farce.” Though the Confederacy ultimately received a lenient peace, Davis spent two years in prison and remained “unreconstructed” long after Appomattox. Breckinridge escaped to Cuba, relocated to Canada and returned to the U.

S. in 1869. He urged southerners to accept the war’s verdict and move forward. Fortunately for America and the South, Breckinridge’s vision of Confederate defeat and Reconstruction, not Jefferson Davis’, prevailed.

John David Smith has written or edited 14 books, including Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro (University of Georgia Press).

n war, Napoleon wrote, "three-quarters turns on personal character and . . . the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter." In notable biographies of Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's president, and John C. Breckinridge, its last secretary of war, and in…
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

hen he moved to Washington in December, 1823, newly elected Tennessee Senator Andrew Jackson was carefully scrutinized by other politicians and citizens from all walks of life. His reputation had preceded him, and he was prominently mentioned as a presidential candidate. His charismatic presence calm, dignified, tall, ramrod-straight stood in vivid contrast to what many had expected. He wrote to a friend, “I am told the opinion of those whose minds were prepared to see me with a Tomahawk in one hand, and a scalping knife in the other has greatly changed and I am getting on very smoothly.” Jackson was indeed best known for his military exploits, especially as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 when his ragtag forces impressively defeated the British in the War of 1812. But he also had a reputation as an Indian fighter. His most notable victory in that role had come against the Creek Nation in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814.

Jackson’s personal and public lives were often controversial, particularly his complex dealings with Native Americans. In Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, noted Jackson scholar Robert V. Remini focuses exclusively on this subject, providing a well documented, thoughtful and sensitive exploration. Remini, who won the National Book Award for his definitive three-volume biography of Jackson, assures readers that “it is not my intention to excuse or exonerate Andrew Jackson for the role he played in the removal of Native Americans west of the Mississippi River. My purpose is simply to explain what happened and why.” To begin to understand what happened, “modern Americans must first appreciate the fact that the mood and temper of Americans during Jackson’s lifetime tolerated and actually condoned removal.” The author traces the life of the boy who “learned to fear and hate Indians from an early age,” sharing the attitude of most frontier settlers. Jackson never forgot his early life in South Carolina when the British allied with Native Americans to wage war against the Americans. “In his mind, and the minds of most frontiersman, the Indians were pawns to be used by any foreign power seeking to gain dominance in North America.” Remini follows Jackson into Tennessee where he develops into “a bold and resourceful Indian fighter, thirsting for Ôencounters with savages.’ ” Jackson was an early convert to the idea, first proposed by Thomas Jefferson, that Indian removal be linked to an exchange of land. Through the years, for Jackson, the most compelling argument for this approach was national security. American settlers could better protect the country against foreign invaders than the Indians.

Remini details not only the numerous battles between Jackson’s forces and Native Americans, but also the many negotiating sessions. “He always addressed Indians as though they were children, irrespective of their age, education, or intellectual maturity.” When negotiating, Jackson never hesitated to use bribery or the threat of violence if his demands were rejected.

The author shows how Indian removal began in the early 1800s by presidential action and continued for 20 years; Congress became involved only when the Senate eventually ratified the treaties. Remini notes that “the Indian Removal Act did not remove the Indians at all. . . . What Jackson did was force the Congress to face up to the Indian issue and address it in the only way possible. And what it did at his direction was harsh, arrogant, racist and inevitable.” Remini believes Jackson can be blamed in particular for his desire to speed things up. “He lacked patience, and by his pressure to move things along quickly he caused unspeakable cruelties to innocent people who deserved better from a nation that prided itself on its commitment to justice and equality.” Remini is to be commended for his balanced study of a difficult period and the complex man at its core.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

hen he moved to Washington in December, 1823, newly elected Tennessee Senator Andrew Jackson was carefully scrutinized by other politicians and citizens from all walks of life. His reputation had preceded him, and he was prominently mentioned as a presidential candidate. His charismatic presence calm,…
NonfictionHistoryFamily & RelationshipsBiography

Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Families separate for many reasons, but when war rips them apart, their longing for one another can be especially acute. Sometimes family members completely lose contact with each other, never knowing if the other is living or dead. In her riveting Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Zhuqing Li narrates the dual biographies of her aunts, who were separated by the Chinese Civil War.

At the center of Li’s story is the Flower Fragrant Garden, the idyllic setting where sisters Jun and Hong grew up in relative security in the early 20th century. Li writes that the compound was “one of Fuzhou’s biggest and richest homes. . . . The main building was a grand, two-story red-brick Western-style house rising from the lush greenery of the rolling grounds. A winding path dipped under the canopy of green, linking smaller buildings like beads on a necklace.”

In 1937, during Japan’s war with China, the sisters were forced into exile and left their garden behind. Then, in the political turmoil that followed the war with Japan, Jun and Hong followed different paths, separated by the Nationalist-Communist divide that erupted after the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. Jun moved to the Nationalist stronghold of Taiwan, where she became a successful teacher and later a businesswoman whose acumen brought her to America. Hong became a prominent physician on China’s mainland, “famous as a pioneer in bringing medical care to China’s remote countryside, and later the Ôgrandma of IVF babies,’ in vitro fertilization, in Fujian Province.”

Hong left her family behind completely as she embraced her life in the new People’s Republic of China, but Jun longed to reunite with her sister. In 1982, the two met again for the first time in 33 years, and through their conversations, Jun began to understand the reasons Hong had to pledge her unwavering support to the Communist party in order to survive. After that, the two sisters never met again. Jun died at 92 in 2014 in her home in Maryland, and in 2020, where the book ends, Hong was still seeing patients in China at the age of 95.

In Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden, Li eloquently tells a moving story of her aunts and their resilience throughout one of China’s most fraught centuries.

Zhuqing Li tells the moving story of her aunts, separated by the Chinese Civil War, and their resilience throughout one of China’s most fraught centuries.
NonfictionFictionYA FictionMemoirHistory

The BookPage editors pick their 5 perfect summer reads

Feature by the editors of BookPage

Every year, the BookPage editors must once again ask the question: What, exactly, does “summer reading” even mean? Here are our definitions, in literary form.

The Season

I devour lighthearted, escapist romances and mysteries during the summer. Basically, if it can hold my attention despite all the distractions of a packed pool or a sunny park, it’s going in my tote bag. However, to keep my brain from snapping in half when I inevitably turn to more challenging books in the fall, I also make sure to reach for a few weightier yet still seasonably appropriate titles. Kristen Richardson’s history of the debutante is my gold standard. Impeccably researched but unabashedly glam and gossipy, The Season describes gorgeous gowns and high society queen bees with the same inquisitive rigor it applies to unpacking the intersections of race and class. In its various permutations, the debutante tradition encapsulates cultural ideas about femininity and its value; depending on the context, it can be regressive or liberating, stifling or affirming. (The chapter on African American debutante balls alone is worth the price of admission.) Make this your afternoon poolside read, and you’ll be the most interesting person at dinner later that night.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Deacon King Kong

When my yard is alive with bugs and birds, when they’re screaming and singing and zipping through the trees, I want a book that crackles with that kind of electricity, like Deacon King Kong. Set in 1969 Brooklyn, James McBride’s seventh novel opens in the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing projects where, in broad daylight, a 71-year-old alcoholic church deacon known as Sportcoat shoots the ear off a 19-year-old drug dealer. That seemingly gritty opening leads into an affectionate village novel that follows a multitude of characters, including congregants of the Five Ends Baptist Church, a lovelorn police officer and an Italian mobster known as the Elephant. As readers learn the truth about Sportcoat’s actions, they also follow foibles and treasure hunts and slapstick party scenes. No one’s the “bad guy,” not even the mob bosses or dirty cops. The dialogue is some of the best you’ll ever read, and many scenes are gut-bustingly funny. Summer is a joy, and so is this book.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Group

I am not a great lover of summertime. The heat, the dirt, the bugs—all of it sends me indoors with a glass of lemonade. This makes a book like Group by Christie Tate my perfect summer read. I tore through this book on vacation last year, using every moment alone in the empty, air-conditioned house to fly through a few more chapters while everyone else was outside. Tate’s memoir of the years she spent in an unconventional group therapy setting ranges from salacious to vulnerable to truly touching. All she has to do, her new therapist tells her, is show up to these group sessions and be honest—about everything. Sexuality, food, relationships, family, death—everything. As Tate slowly opens up to her fellow group members, she builds real friendships for the first time and learns to defuse the shame and low self-worth that had kept her from making authentic connections during her first 26 years. Perfect for a weekend trip or plane ride, this book’s got heart, hope and enough juicy confessions to keep you turning the pages at lightning speed.

—Christy, Associate Editor

All That She Carried

Whether I’m traveling across the world on a plane or installed under an umbrella on the beach, summer adventures inspire me to decenter screens and their attendant distractions. This means I have the capacity to focus on books that reward a reader’s careful attention, like Tiya Miles’ National Book Award-winning All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Miles, a historian and MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient, uses a single artifact—a simple cotton sack given to a 9-year-old child named Ashley by her mother when Ashley was sold to a different plantation—to offer insight into the often undocumented lives of Black women. As she traces the journey of Ashley’s sack from its origins in 1850s South Carolina through the Great Migration and to its eventual discovery at a Nashville flea market, Miles honors the strength of family ties and finds creative ways to fill gaps in the historical record. This book will make you both think and feel, providing a reading experience to remember.

—Trisha, Publisher

The Diviners

There is nothing I want more in the summer than a big honking series. (Especially if it’s complete. No cliffhanger endings for me!) I want to dive into a fictional world for as long as possible before coming up for air, and Libba Bray’s quartet of novels about supernaturally gifted teens solving mysteries in New York City during the Roaring ’20s fits the bill to a T. The series opener is replete with positutely delicious period vernacular and horrors both imagined (a murderous ghost resurrecting himself with body parts carved from his victims) and all too real (“color lines” at jazz clubs where Black Americans perform on stage but aren’t allowed to enter as customers). The Diviners is exactly the sort of tale I love to stay up into the wee hours of hot summer nights reading—which is good, because in Bray’s talented hands, some scenes are so terrifying that I wouldn’t be able to turn off the lights anyway.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Any book can be a beach read if you put your mind to it.
History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

f you’re a history buff of any age, you will not be disappointed by The Good Fight: How World War II Was Won. Stephen E. Ambrose, a world-renowned author and historian, trumpets the feats of unsung American heroes as he chronicles the major military campaigns in Europe, Asia, North Africa, the Atlantic and Pacific arenas. Significant events including the Manhattan Project, the holocaust, the war conferences, war crimes trials and the Marshall Plan are woven into the fabric of this comprehensive WWII compendium.

In our age of technology, smart bombs, Star Wars movies and missile defense strategies, the younger generation will be astounded to learn that our armed forces trained for combat with wooden rifles, flour bags for grenades and trucks for tanks. Even the most knowledgeable reader may be struck by how unprepared the United States was for battle. By all accounts, we should have lost the war; but we didn’t. It is with heart-swelling pride that Ambrose attributes our ultimate success to the determination, initiative, commitment and courage of America’s fighting forces. Specific examples such as Operation Husky profile an American soldier who declined individual recognition and promotion to remain with his regiment. These men fought out of duty and loyalty and succeeded because of faith in a cause greater than their own. Authentic WWII photographs are very effective in tandem with the written account of events. Together with numerous maps, there are 38 full-page photos plus quarter-page photo inserts on the text pages. All of them are moments of triumph and reflections of devastation that transport the reader to another time and place.

Ambrose’s The Good Fight is a stunning portrait of America’s innate goodness as a beacon to freedom that could not be extinguished or even diminished by the world’s most ruthless tyrants. America rose to meet its greatest challenge and therein lies a lesson for us all.

C. Elizabeth Davis is a former marketing director for the education division of Turner Broadcasting System.

f you're a history buff of any age, you will not be disappointed by The Good Fight: How World War II Was Won. Stephen E. Ambrose, a world-renowned author and historian, trumpets the feats of unsung American heroes as he chronicles the major military campaigns…
History

An exceptional biography of Adams

Review by bookpagedev

The extraordinary talents and outstanding accomplishments of John Adams tend to be overshadowed by the illustrious and colorful careers of his contemporaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Adams himself thought his own major attributes were "candor, probity, and decision," and those qualities were crucial as he shared in the leadership of a revolutionary people who made the difficult transition to a stable, responsible, representative government. David McCullough, who has received National Book Awards for both history and biography and whose Truman received the Pulitzer Prize, superbly captures the life and times of this remarkable figure in his compelling new book, John Adams.

In 1787, after completing a book that he thought would make him unpopular, Adams wrote to a friend, "Popularity was never my mistress, nor was I ever, or shall I ever be a popular man. But one thing I know, a man must be sensible of the errors of the people, and upon his guard against them, and must run the risk of their displeasure sometimes, or he will never do them any good in the long run." That quote, McCullough says, is "about as concise a synopsis of Adams’ course through public life as could be found."

Certainly Adams made mistakes in judgment. But when one surveys the range of his thought and actions during his entire public career, it is remarkable how astute he was in both the long and short terms. For example, Adams chaired the committee that asked Jefferson to draft a Declaration of Independence. But, after much revision, it was Adams whose speech to the Continental Congress convinced the delegates to pass it. As a delegate from New Jersey remembered: "[Adams was] the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency. . . . It was he who sustained the debate, and by the force of reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure."

In February 1778, when Adams was appointed to serve as one of three men to negotiate an alliance with France, "It marked," for Adams, "the beginning of what would become a singular odyssey, in which he would journey farther in all, both by sea and land, than any other leader of the American cause." He would help negotiate the peace treaty that ended the war with Great Britain in 1783 and become our first ambassador to that country in 1785. His most important service abroad, however, may have been negotiating for bank loans. "With his success obtaining Dutch loans at the critical hour of the Revolution," McCullough says, "he felt, as did others, that he had truly saved his country."

As the second U.S. president, he presided over a divided country and a divided party. Despite these disadvantages, under his leadership the Navy was greatly strengthened and proved decisive in keeping the young country out of war with France. As Adams wrote to a friend: "I desire no other inscription over my gravestone than: ‘Here lies John Adams, who took upon himself the responsibility of peace with France in the year 1800.’ "

McCullough skillfully interweaves accounts of his subject’s private and public lives, focusing in particular on Adams’ marriage to Abigail Smith, who was "in all respects his equal." The author’s insight into the relationship and, at times, rivalry between Adams and Thomas Jefferson is also of particular interest. Their unique correspondence after both were out of office remains one of the most important literary treasures from the Founding Fathers. "The level and range of their discourse were always above and beyond the ordinary," McCullough writes. "At times memory failed; often hyperbole entered in . . . they were two of the leading statesmen of their time, but also two of the finest writers, and they were showing what they could do."

This exceptional biography should be enjoyed by anyone who wants to explore in some detail the complexity of the Revolutionary and Early American eras as experienced by one who was a crucial mover and shaker.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

The extraordinary talents and outstanding accomplishments of John Adams tend to be overshadowed by the illustrious and colorful careers of his contemporaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Adams himself thought his own major attributes were "candor, probity, and decision," and those qualities were…

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